Write up what Open Source is for a 8-12 year old.
bertboerland@ww... - January 8, 2008 - 15:11
| Project: | Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) |
| Component: | Task idea |
| Category: | task |
| Priority: | minor |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | needs work |
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Description
Drupal is an Open Source project meaning it distributed under certain conditions. These conditions are not very well understood since they seem not logical to some and are surrounded by lots of irrelevant noise.
If you think you do understand the GPL / an opensource license and if you think you can creativly / freely without having to say "I am not a lawyer" present this /in/ the language /metaphor of a 8-12 year old /to/ an 8-12 year old, give it a try.
Be creative, use an every day life experience of a youngster to explain what open source (and specific, GPL) is and what the pro's and contra's of such a licensing model is.
#1
This is an interesting task, but I think it will be difficult to judge on our part as there is no defined deliverable and making sure that the student's description is correct might involve one of *us* being a lawyer.
I'm also a little confused by all of the '/'s in the second paragraph, but I think I get the gist of what the task is.
What exactly is the purpose of this explanation? Is it to convince a young person that the GPL/open source is good? Is it to briefly summarize what is allowed and what is forbidden by the GPL?
I also think we should specify a license here. Describing certain licenses, for example the MIT license, is probably much easier than describing the GPL.
As for pros and cons, related to what? Related to other open source licenses? Related to closed source?
I want the description to be fairly solid so that it's easy to judge this task. Some of the other "creative" tasks have been a bit problematic because of differences in opinion and a lack of a clear endpoint.
#2
If anything, this task could be targeted to anyone. If the aim is to make the idea and principles behind open source easy to understand for the public, it should be written so simply that (virtually) anyone could understand. On the most part, the same sort of stuff would be required for everyone - it should be simple for everyone, not just children.
-Tim